IF YOU think that you don't get enough sleep, then you are probably right.
New research has found that 89 per cent of people are not getting the recommended eight hours of sleep a night. It's not surprising then that 62 per cent of people find it difficult to get up in the morning, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people by Empathy Research. The survey of 18- to 44-year-olds was conducted in September for Pharmaton.
Many people said the lack of sleep was affecting their work. Some 56 per cent of respondents said they lost concentration at work when they were overtired. Some 24 per cent said they made mistakes because of tiredness, while almost half said they became easily irritated. And 83 per cent said they suffered from a lack of vitality during the day.
Family GP Paul Heslin said tiredness was causing loss of efficiency, productivity and profitability in the workplace.
"Up to 20 per cent of patients visiting my surgery suffer from fatigue," he said.
"Many of these patients have no obvious medical condition. Some are aware that they are more prone to infections, especially in the winter, and some will get repeated viral infections and will talk of feeling run down [or] suffer from fatigue."
Most people said they drank tea, coffee or a high energy drink to overcome tiredness, but Dr Heslin said a good diet and a well-balanced lifestyle would be more appropriate remedies.
Excess fatigue could also be caused by an undiagnosed sleep disorder, according to Dr Catherine Crowe, sleep disorders specialist at Dublin's Mater Private Hospital.
She said that 7 per cent of people had significant insomnia, while 4 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women had sleep apnoea.
This is a condition where you periodically stop breathing during sleep, before a reflex response awakens you. The constant sleep disruption, however brief, leads to a permanent sense of exhaustion.
Dr Crowe said that this condition often manifested itself in middle age, so people believed their excessive fatigue was due to advancing age and pressures of work and family.
Others feared they were depressed because of their lack of energy.
The Irish Sleep Apnoea Trust has estimated that up to 12,000 people have a severe version of sleep apnoea, with some sufferers awakening more than 30 times an hour.
Many people with sleep apnoea do not realise that they are awakening to breathe many times during the night so the condition often goes undiagnosed, according to Dan Smyth, chairman of the trust.
As well as causing fatigue, he said sleep apnoea affected short-term memory and cognitive function, leading people to become forgetful and experience difficulty in concentrating.
The focus should not be on the length of sleep, but on the quality of that rest. Regular brief awakenings disrupted the pattern of sleep so that sufferers got very little deep sleep, even if they were in bed for more than eight hours, Mr Smyth said.
